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Last Updated:
Mar 19th, 2008 - 07:43:02 |
o strangers, twenty-somethings James Petix and Sarah Babila describe
their lives like this: “We live in an apartment with two cats … and a
movie.”
That movie? It Came From Detroit, a feature-length garage rock
documentary chronicling the local scene’s history, bands, influential
people and places, White Stripes-fueled international hype and short,
hard fall back to reality.
Through contemporary interviews and performance footage both modern and
archival, It Came From Detroit explores the scene’s early days with
bands like The Gories and Rocket 455, the mid-period with The Go and
Demolition Dollrods and on to The White Stripes’ rise to fame, that
fame’s effect on the scene and, finally, what happened when the hype
died down.
Petix, a metro Detroit native, began making the documentary in March
2002 after finishing film school at Savannah College of Art and Design
in Georgia. “I was like, ‘What are you gonna do? What do you do after
you graduate?’” Petix said. ”And I decided I wanted to come home and
film this garage rock scene.”
He had spent the summer before his senior year hanging out in Detroit
rock bars like the Magic Stick and the Gold Dollar. “That was the
summer of The White Stripes ... My friends and I would go to the Garden
Bowl and go bowling and you just knew about [the garage rock scene]. It
was exciting to be there.”
“I wanted to take the skills I had learned on Tokyo Below [his senior
project documentary about underground rock ‘n’ roll in the Japanese
city] and apply them,” Petix said. “So I moved back home with my dad in
Troy and got a job delivering pizzas. I got a camera from my dad as a
graduation present, which is the camera I still use now. It’s all beat
up, but at the time it was cool. And I didn’t have a [professional,
external] microphone at all; I just had an idea.”
The idea was simple: He planned to interview 10 Detroit garage rock
bands, figuring that this would give “a nice cross-section of what was
happening.” But before Petix got even that far, a friend tipped him to
a film from 2000 called Detroit Rock Movie, a rough, homemade look at
the Detroit rock scene that was more a collection of bootleg footage
and home movies than a proper documentary. He tracked down the
filmmaker, Ben Hernandez, with collaboration in mind. “It was great
because when I met Ben he kinda told me the oral history of the Detroit
scene,” Petix said. “He would say, ‘You like The White Stripes, but The
White Stripes would never have been without The Gories.’ And I’d be
like, ‘Oh, well, who where The Gories?’ and he’d say, ‘The Gories were
the band ….’ He was introducing me to the historical kind of side of
the Detroit scene.“
“But our relationship just kind of drifted apart,” Petix said, “which
was fine because at that point I had gotten my feet wet enough that I
could approach people and do it. The first person I think I ever asked
to interview was Ko [Shih]. I went up to her, she was doing merch at a
Brendan Benson show, and I said, ‘Hey, can I interview you?’ … We did
it backstage at the Magic Stick — no lights, no mics, you can’t hear
anything, you can’t see anything. It’s horrible. But Ko introduced me
to Meg White [of The White Stripes] as, ‘This cool guy James that’s
doing this documentary.’ And she introduced me to the Soledad Brothers
too. So every band that I met introduced me to another band.”
“It was a very natural evolution of how I learned about the rock scene
and dug back and dug back until we actually got to The Gories and we
tracked down [drummer] Peg [O'Neill] and we talked to her. We dug back
until we found the story. Because we waited so long, the scene changed
— and we happened to be documenting it the entire time.”
When the film’s storyline was still in its infancy, Petix — then
working at the advertising video editing job he still holds —
went out a lot, taped tons of shows and did many guerilla-style, “no
lights, no mics” backstage interviews, but it wasn’t amounting to much.
The story was still a loose idea at best and his relationship with
Babila, who he was living with at this point, was feeling the strain.
“It was kinda like, ‘My boyfriend’s making this crazy movie and he’s
gone on weekends every night ‘cause he’s shooting these shows, but he’s
not doing anything with it’” Babila remembered. “It was getting
frustrating, like, ‘What are you gonna do with all this footage? What
are you gonna do?’ So I started telling him — because he was looking
for a producer but I didn’t want to be that person to say, ‘Well, I’ll
do that,’ — but I said, ‘Well, I could help you with a couple things.’”
That’s how Babila, a receptionist/administrative assistant with no
filmmaking background and little initial interest in the Detroit garage
rock scene came to produce its most definitive chronicle. Along the
way, she learned to love the film’s subjects; and the couple
somehow kept their relationship together as well.
For a brief period there was a team of four people working on It Came
From Detroit: Petix as director, cameraman, editor and interviewer;
Babila and their friend Vicki Algarra as producers; and Matt Hyland as
production assistant. The team didn’t last long. “Everybody had other
priorities and couldn’t really commit as much as James and I could to
the movie,” Babila said, “because they were both married and had other
things in their lives. So they couldn’t come over every day, whereas I
had no choice but to be around it every single day. So it just became,
‘OK, what can I do?’ and I just started learning as I went.”
Ultimately, Petix and Babila feel that the three years they’ve spent
making the film together have had a positive impact on their
relationship. “If we weren’t working on [the film] together, James
wouldn’t have time for a relationship, I don’t think,” Babila admitted.
“But I think that if you’re in a working relationship and you can work
together and be productive together and trust each other enough to be
honest about your art … I think it works. We’re spending time together
and we’re creating something together, which is really positive.”
The film itself is mostly upbeat. “We decided a long time ago that the
movie was not going to be about gossip because gossip is not truth,”
Petix said. “And when you’re out for a documentary, you’re out for, if
not factual truth, at least a common truth. I think that when you’re
telling the story of a scene, there’s a common truth that you try to go
for. It’s something that everybody can accept and that’s what we were
going for. And we have a very positive outlook on the scene and we
still think that it’s positive. But we definitely show some negative
aspects, too; I don’t think it’s a fluff piece.”
But it does show all of the bands in a largely positive light — even
The Whites Stripes, who thus far have not participated in the movie. “I
decided very early on that the film was not about The White Stripes,”
Petix said. “That is something I want in bold: This film is not about
The White Stripes; it’s about the scene that The White Stripes came up
from and what had to happen in order for The White Stripes to exist.”
“Jack White’s not been involved in this project at all,” Petix
continued. “But you know what? We found such a better story about the
truth about the garage rock scene — the heart of it. We found the heart
of it and it didn’t have anything to do with The White Stripes. Some
people get the impression that The White Stripes created the Detroit
garage rock scene and that’s not true. There were a number of
really great bands in the scene before The White Stripes even
existed. But once they got popular they did influence the scene as
a whole. Suddenly, success became a possibility. Our movie is
about a group of friends and what happens to that group when one of
those bands gets famous. We focus on what happens when suddenly
they’re all in the spotlight, and what happens once that spotlight goes
away and all you’re left with in the end is the music.”
“We wanted to show the heart of the scene, the inspiration — where it
all came from; where all of this excitement and energy came from ….
This wasn’t just people trying to get famous; this was a pure, genuine
thing,” Babila said. “People wanted to play music because they love
playing music and they had this great scene of friends who all inspired
them and supported them.”
How did they decide which bands to include? “As I got into it, I
realized that there were certain bands I had to talk about or else you
didn’t get some of the story,” Petix said. “So, I might not have picked
Rocket 455 at the beginning, but at some point it became very evident
that I needed to talk about Rocket 455 if I wanted to talk about The
Go. And I needed to talk about The Go if I wanted to talk about The
White Stripes. It became an evolution.”
“I think we showcased what we found exciting about the scene; what
inspired me to spend four and a half years of my life to do this,”
Petix said. “That pure inspiration is ultimately, I hope, what comes
out on the screen.”
They seem to have gotten it right. Petix and Babila have already
screened the movie for a few of the bands and it has enjoyed a positive
reception. “When I showed Freddy Fortune [of Fortune & Maltese] the
scene about the history of garage rock — I mean, he’s basically the
definitive guy you ask about garage rock — I said, ‘Did I get that
garage rock section right?’” Petix recalled. “He said, ‘Yeah, you got
it.’”
After its Detroit Film Theatre premiere, the couple hopes to show It
Came From Detroit at the Sundance Film Festival and then festivals and
theaters around the world. “It’s our job to enlighten and educate, I
think, through this film.”
Once It Came From Detroit is finished (the version screening at the DFT
will be a close-to-final rough cut), Petix and Babila said they have
been asked to make music videos for some of the more prominent Detroit
garage rock bands. “We’re really excited about doing a couple short
projects,” Petix said, “where we can just kind of do it for a couple
weeks and that’s it.” After that, he plans to film another documentary,
of a different style, in Japan.
As the conversation ended, Petix reflected on the It Came From
Detroit’s evolution. “We started with no microphones; I added one
microphone at a time and one little piece of equipment at a time, as I
could afford, throughout the film until we had what we have now,” he
said. “But still, this is the garage rock movie because it’s like, the
camera’s LCD screen doesn’t really work; I have to tape this other
thing together; we don’t have a light box — we just shine light
off white foamcore boards. It’s kinda ghetto, but in the same sense I
think it really mirrors what these guys [in the bands] are trying to
do. You go out with your heart and you try to do what you want to do
regardless of whether you’re good, talented or have the best equipment.
That’s exactly how these bands have done it. So that’s been a big
inspiration for us: Just go out there and do it regardless of
anything.” | RDW
It Came From Detroit premieres October 27 at the Detroit Film Theatre. More info: itcamefromdetroit.com or dia.org/dft.
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